By Apostolis Fotiadis ATHENS, Oct 2, 2011 (IPS) - Every working day a long queue of people forms outside the State Translation Service in Thission in downtown Athens from early in the morning. Most are youngsters processing documents they need to leave Greece for study or work. Many move on to queue later outside embassies for visas. These are signs on the street of the emigration wave sweeping Greece. As G ...

Think Greece's current economic malaise is the worst ever experienced in Europe? Think again. Germany, economic historian Albrecht Ritschl argues in a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview, has been the worst debtor nation of the past century. He warns the country should take a more chaste approach in the euro crisis or it could face renewed demands for World War II reparations. Former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer ...

Austerity and repression won't bring Europe out of crisis, we need a social struggle against free market politics. By Christian Marazzi The European sovereign debt crisis, which was caused by member states' public debt but increased because of the actions taken to rescue the banks after the 2008 crisis, demonstrates at least three things. First, that currency does not exist without a state. Second, that cap ...

• Bailout fund may be used to buy back Greek debt • Markets in turmoil amid escalating anxiety By Ian Traynor European leaders bowed to the inevitable and conceded that Greece is likely to default on its massive debt burden, which would be a first among the 17 countries using the euro. They also abruptly shifted tack in the eurozone debt crisis by raising the possibility of using the eurozone's bailout fund ...

BERLIN – From the start of the Greek debt crisis in 2010, the major European players should have understood the risks and consequences that it posed for the European Union. They certainly don’t give that impression to onlookers. The crisis was always about much more than Greece: a disorderly insolvency there would threaten to pull other economies on the EU’s southern periphery, including some very big ones, ...

When Stephane Hessel wrote in Time for Outrage! that indignation with injustice should turn to ‘a peaceful insurrection’ perhaps he did not expect that the movement of ‘indignados’ in Spain and ‘aganaktismenoi’ (outraged) in Greece would take his advice to heart so soon and so spectacularly. In the following link you can hear the audio from the event organized by the Birckbeck Institute for the Humanities: ...

Interview with economist Yanis Varoufakis with Dutch subtitles. "The Euro system was not designed to take the shock of the great financial crisis of 2008."   ...

For over a year, Deutsche Bank and the ECB made us believe that a Greek default would be disastrous for Europe. They were lying through their teeth. In Frankfurt, two of Europe’s most powerful men sit virtually across the street from one another in the high-rise headquarters of two of the continent’s most important institutions. No one elected these men to rule over us. No one voted for their institutions t ...

The real causes of and the myths about the crisis by Jérôme E. Roos Negotiations are going on for an effective abolition of Greek national sovereignty in what the Financial Times has called an “unprecedented outside intervention in the Greek economy.” Believe it or not, the European Union is set to ‘peacefully’ annex Greece, essentially putting the country’s economy under direct conservatorship of the north ...

By Jérôme E. Roos In the wake of the Greek and Irish crises last year, analysts predicted that the collapse of the eurozone might become the big story of 2011. But while our neighbors in North Africa and the Middle East have burst into full-blown revolution, all appears to be quiet on the Western front. Or does it?   Last Thursday, Moody’s downgraded Spain’s credit rating, sending shock waves through t ...